


Demon's Eye

by Alchemine



Category: 18th Century CE RPF, Mozart l'Opéra Rock - Mozart/Baguian & Guirao
Genre: 18th Century, Classical Music, Gen, composers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-03
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-03-16 03:04:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3472055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alchemine/pseuds/Alchemine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Mozart children encounter someone who will haunt Wolfgang forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> While this story is technically based on Mozart, L'Opéra Rock, you don't need to have seen the show to read it. As long as you know who Mozart was, and that he and his sister toured Europe for several years as child prodigies, you're good to go. Thanks for stopping by!

Nannerl had forgotten exactly which town they were in. They had been traveling for weeks now, and all the different towns and cities seemed to run together, just like all the roads outside their carriage window blurred into one long, dull road. Anyway, keeping track of those things was Papa's job. Her job, and Wolfgang's, was to play their music well, and do the tricks Papa had taught them, and behave like a little lady and gentleman in front of the important people. They had performed last night in a big palace full of marble floors and gilded ceilings, and Papa had been very pleased indeed with the gifts of gold and jewels they’d been given. He was so happy that today, for a treat, he was taking them to see a show--not a stuffy concert in a theater, but a real show, performed on a wooden stage in the open air. 

She had thought they might take a carriage to the place where the show was being held, but Papa said it wasn’t far and they needed to economize where they could, and so they walked, only getting lost once when they took a wrong turning down a street full of poky little shops. When they finally found the square, it was terribly hot and dusty and crowded, and Nannerl was worried about her blue silk dress, which had been made especially for this trip. Mama would know how to get the spots out if she got dirty, but Mama was far away in Salzburg. She felt a little sick from the sun, and from the candied nuts and marzipan that Papa had bought for her and Wolfgang along the way, but she would not dream of making a fuss when Papa was being so kind to them. 

Five-year-old Wolfgang, on the other hand, had no such worries. He complained that his feet hurt and he couldn't see, so Papa hoisted him up and settled him in the crook of one arm, where he looked around, every inch the young prince surveying his kingdom. He caught Nannerl's eye and pointed at a nearby man whose bald head glistened like a hard-cooked egg in the noon glare, and they both giggled, Nannerl covering her mouth with one hand. 

Papa heard it and looked down with his eyebrows all knitted together. 

"What's funny?"

"Nothing, Papa." Nannerl made her face go prim and sober, a skill she had perfected during a hundred long evenings at the sort of formal dinners where children were to be seen and not heard. "Will the show start soon?"

Her father nodded and started to turn away, then looked at her more closely and reached to lay the back of one big hand against her cheek. "You're all flushed, little one. Do you have a fever? We can go back to the lodging house if you're ill."

"Oh, no," Nannerl said, not quite sure if it was the truth or a lie. "It's hot, that's all. I want to stay." 

"Well, if you’re sure," Papa began, but just then a man in ragged lace and velvet bounded onto the hastily knocked-together platform at one end of the square, and the show swept all three of them into its spell. 

Nannerl had seen travelling performers before, both at home and abroad, but never anything quite as fascinating as this. First came two men who juggled burning brands and tossed them back and forth across the stage; then a boy with trained dogs that wore white ruffs and walked on their hind legs; and then a group of tiny acrobats, no taller than Wolfgang, took the stage to leap and tumble and fling each other in the air. No sooner had the little people bowed and departed than a beautiful black-haired lady arrived—this part drew loud whistles and rude comments from the men in the audience—and sang a tragic song about her dead lover. A conjuror swept about in a long cloak and made showers of rose petals and hissing fireworks and fluttering, flapping doves appear from nowhere. And then just when Nannerl thought surely nothing else could happen, a clown emerged from a trap door in the stage, in a particolored costume and a peaked hat, with his face painted stark white and red. He turned a lazy flip-flop off the edge of the platform and began dancing and capering through the crowd, moving steadily toward the Mozarts where they stood. 

Wolfgang took one look at the clown and started to whimper. “I don't like him.”

“Don't be silly, son.” Papa said, and ruffled Wolfgang's hair. “He's a clown. You're supposed to laugh at him. See, everyone else is laughing.”

“He's not funny.” Wolfgang's lower lip quivered. “He's scary. He'll eat me up.”

“No he won't, will he Nannerl?” Papa gave Nannerl a meaningful glance over the top of Wolfgang's curly blond head, and she knew she was supposed to agree. She _wanted_ to agree—she wasn’t a baby like Wolfgang, but a big girl of ten, more than old enough to know that the clown was just an ordinary man with greasepaint on—but the longer she looked at him, the more uncertain she felt. The clown's eyes were so very dark and shiny, and the red paint smeared around his mouth looked so awfully like blood, as if he really had been eating little boys. He grinned, exposing long yellow teeth, and the sickness that had plagued her earlier came back in a hot queasy rush, until she was afraid to open her mouth.

“Maria Anna,” Papa said warningly. “Tell your brother there's nothing to be afraid of.”

Acid burned at the back of Nannerl’s throat, and for a moment she truly thought she would be ill, but then the idea of spoiling her blue silk came back to her, and she swallowed fiercely once, then once again, and clasped her arms hard across her middle for good measure. 

“Papa’s right, Wolferl,” she said in a strained voice. “It’s just a funny clown, see?”

A tear spilled over the lower edge of Wolfgang's eye and ran down his plump little cheek, still sticky from the sweets he’d eaten. 

"It’s not a funny clown," he whispered. "It's a bad clown. A bad clown." 

Nannerl ducked her head and looked past her brother’s dangling feet in their small buckled shoes. The clown had nearly reached them now; she could hear his high, bubbling laughter as he took a mock tumble and was boosted up by the approving crowd, waving a bladder on a stick. He would be upon them in only a few seconds, and all at once she knew that if her eyes met his, or worse, if he touched her, she would die on the spot.” 

“I’m sick,” she said abruptly. “Papa, I’m sorry, you were right. I do have a fever. I should have said so before. Please can we go?” 

Her father frowned, and she thought he might say no just to teach her a lesson for deceiving him when he’d first asked. He was strict that way sometimes. But instead he smoothed damp strands of hair off her forehead and said, “I thought as much. Come along then, we have travelling still to do and you must guard your health. We’ll take a carriage back to the lodging house.” 

Nannerl followed him meekly from the square, already thinking ahead to the relief of lying down in the dim quiet of their rented room. She wouldn’t even complain about the musty curtains or the way the bed sagged in the middle, she thought, as she tried to hold up her precious skirts with one hand and keep the other pressed to her aching stomach. But just before the crowd closed behind them, she glanced over her shoulder and saw the clown standing there, watching her go with one hand raised in a wave, its grinning lips coming together to form a single, inaudible word. 

She wondered what that word might have been through the bumpy ride back to their lodgings. She wondered later that night, when Wolfgang woke them all up screaming about the bad clown and crying because he had wet the bed in his terror. She was still wondering when they packed their trunks the following morning and left for their next engagement. 

She wasn’t sure, but she thought it might have been a name.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wolfgang will never really be rid of the clown.

It was his luck, Nico thought, that he should have an unexpected week off lessons just as the first real autumn rainstorm set in. He'd wandered around at home for two days, getting in the servants' way and annoying his family, and as soon as there'd been a break in the rain, he'd rushed to escape before his younger siblings could whine to be taken along. Now he was beginning to regret that he'd gone out at all. His friends were too busy with their own studies to keep him company, he'd been splashed all over by carriages bumping too fast through puddles, and worst of all, he had forgotten to beg any money from his mother before he left. He stuck out his tongue at a bakeshop window full of luscious fruit- and nut-covered pastries he couldn't buy, and turned down a crooked little side street, wondering if he ought just to go home.

 _At least it will be dry there_ , he was thinking, when without warning he was nearly knocked off his feet by someone going in the other direction. A brief confusion of tangled limbs ensued, accompanied by a small, hard head driving into the center of his waistcoat.

"Ouch!" said the other person. "Look out where you're going, why don't you?"

"Ugghhhh," wheezed Nico, who was bent over with hands planted on his knees, trying to get his breath back. From that position, he looked up and discovered a scrawny little boy with a beaky nose, a profusion of fine, curly blond hair half contained by a black velvet ribbon, and a rose silk overcoat that dripped with gold brocade. The effect was both resplendent and slightly comical.

"Why—don't—YOU look out?" he managed.

To his surprise, the boy laughed. "Fair enough. We were both careless. I'm sorry. Are you hurt very much?"

"I don't think so," said Nico, straightening up with some effort. He felt like a giant as he did it. The top of the boy's head barely reached the middle of his chest. "I suppose you're right; it was my fault too. Sorry—what's your name?"

"Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, at your service." The boy made a sweeping, theatrical bow in Nico's general direction, so low that his nose almost touched his mud-spattered shoes. "Or Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, if you like. My family calls me Wolferl, but I'm afraid I'll have to order you executed if you try. I could, you know. I'm very famous."

"And very small," Nico said dryly. "How old are you, Wolfgangus Chrysalis Theo-whatever?"

"Thirteen," said the boy, as if daring him to make something of it. "Fourteen in January."

"What?" Nico looked again, but still saw a small child dressed up in fine clothes. "Really? But then we're almost the same age. I thought you were younger."

"Everyone does." The boy scowled. "Papa says it's good for my career, but I hate it. Girls treat me like a pet and I can never see over people's heads at the theater. I hope I grow up to be seven feet tall."

"Well, forgive me for mistaking you, then." Nico held out his hand. "Suppose I just call you Wolfgang?"

"That will do nicely," Wolfgang said, shaking hands with the all the gravity of an adult. "And what shall I call you, since we're making introductions?"

"I'm Nico."

"That's all? I ought to lend you one or two of my names. Goodness knows I have enough."

"I've got some others too," Nico said. "But one name is plenty for meeting in the street on a Wednesday morning. Speaking of that, shouldn't you be at lessons? I'm only free because my tutor is ill this week."

"Ah, that makes two of us," Wolfgang said. "Only for 'tutor' substitute 'father.' My papa's in bed with a bad leg, so we're stuck here until he's well enough to travel again. We're on tour, you see." He gestured grandly about, as if indicating that their tour was set to encompass the entire world, and Nico stifled a laugh. He couldn't quite decide whether Wolfgang's oddness was charming or irritating, but thought it probably depended on the day and one's mood.

"Hang on a minute," he said, remembering something. "You mean you're that German boy? The composer? My father was telling my mother about you at dinner last night. He said he'd seen you perform in England once, when he was there on business."

"I told you I was famous," Wolfgang said. "And yes, I'm that German boy, and usually I'm performing, but right now I'm mostly hanging around in our dark old lodgings, watching Papa write letters home and listening to him complain about how much money we're losing."

Nico pulled a face. "Sounds dull."

"It is, awfully, but I don't have much choice. I've been writing an antiphon to pass the time, and Papa found a musician to help me do it properly, an old friar called Martini. And—" Wolfgang grinned, suddenly impish. "I've been able to get out on my own a few times when Papa is resting. I love to compose, but sometimes I like to do other things too, and there's hardly ever any time when we're traveling."

"Isn't your father going to be upset if he finds out you're gone?"

Wolfgang's grin got bigger, revealing gaps at the sides where his eyeteeth were still coming in. "I told him I was going to church. And I did go there," he said piously. "I even lit a candle and said a prayer. And then I left and went looking for something else to do."

Seeing a chance to put an end to his boredom, Nico seized upon it like an owl swooping on a mouse. "Well, I'm looking for something to do too, so why don't we do it together?" He glanced around the street with its narrow, crammed-together buildings, wondering what sort of entertainments an escaped child prodigy might enjoy. "Do you have any money?"

Wolfgang shook his head. "I'm not allowed any. Papa pays for everything. Do you?"

"No," Nico said with a sigh. "That's all right, though. It's easy to have fun even without money, when you're with a friend."

"Can we be friends, then?" Wolfgang looked up at him with a pleased, shy expression. "I've never really had a friend my own age, except once, and I don't know when we'll ever see each other again. That's another thing there's never any time for."

"Oh," said Nico, suddenly feeling rather sorry for Wolfgang. "Well, yes, of course. I have lots of friends, but I can always use another one."

"Excellent!" Wolfgang beamed, then got a distracted look and started digging into the various pockets of his overcoat. "I should give you a present. To seal the friendship, you know. Ah, here's something." From deep in a side pocket, he pulled a slightly squashed bread roll, which he presented to Nico with a flourish. "Don't worry, it's fresh. Well, it was this morning when I swiped it from the kitchen."

Nico accepted the gift with pleasure. His father's business was thriving and their family enjoyed a well-spread table at meals, but he was growing fast and there was always an empty corner or two in his stomach.

"Thanks," he said with his mouth full.

"I am but your lordship's humble procurer." Wolfgang made another of his fancy bows and then laughed. "Come on, eat and walk. I want to see as much as I can before I have to go back to the dungeon."

They spent a happy hour or two wandering around the streets, watching people going in and out of shops and coffeehouses and taverns, gawking at prostitutes, stopping to play with stray dogs, and finally being shouted at by a colossal man with an eye patch who thought they meant to steal the apples he was carting along. He dropped the traces of his barrow and made as if to grab them, and they both ran for it, shrieking with the sort of terrified laughter that comes from panic. At the next turning, they made a sharp left-Wolfgang struggling to keep up with Nico's longer legs-and ducking into a handy opening further along, found themselves in an alley that ended in a stone wall higher than Nico's head.

"Is he following us?" Nico was hot and panting and exhausted and had a cramp in his side, but at the same time he felt wonderful, full of excited high spirits. He wiped his sweat-slick forehead with his sleeve, grateful that he hadn't worn his new coat today. His mother was going to be displeased enough about the condition of this one.

Wolfgang glanced over his shoulder. "I don't see him. We'd better hide, though. Maybe we can climb over that wall."

"Well, I can," Nico said, eyeing it and hoping he was right. "Can you, though? Aren't musicians supposed to protect their hands with their lives?"

"Something like that," Wolfgang said. "But I won't be able to play the violin if old One-Eye breaks both my arms either, so let's go." He pushed Nico toward the wall as he said it. "Give me a boost, will you?"

Wolfgang was small and skinny, but despite that—or perhaps because of it—he turned out to be as agile as a monkey. He got onto Nico's bent back, swarmed up the wall, and was over the top and gone in seconds. Nico found handholds and footholds in the rough stone and followed him more slowly, dropping onto the ground on the other side with a thud that reverberated from the soles of his shoes to the top of his head.

"I thought you'd never come," Wolfgang said, helping to steady him. "Where are we?"

"I don't know." Nico looked around, noting orange trees and box hedges and rose bushes with the last few bedraggled summer blossoms still clinging to them. Fish splashed in a shallow green pond, overlooked by a marble statue with a haughty expression. It had rained again briefly while they were running, and everything was silvery wet and dripping. "Someone's garden. A really rich person's. Ours at home isn't this big, or this nice."

"I've seen nicer," said Wolfgang, regarding the grape arbor with the skeptical eye of a boy who had visited palaces. "I wonder if the rich person is at home."

"I hope not," said Nico. "We'll just be quiet and see if we can slip away without anyone noticing us. There must be a gate that lets out onto the street at the other side."

"After you," said Wolfgang, waving his hand.

They crept along the edge of the garden beside a row of cypresses, staying on the grass and off graveled paths that might crunch and give them away, and soon enough they did find a gate with a street beyond it—a much quieter street than any they had been on yet, and one that at first glance Nico didn't recognize. He was fumbling with the latch on the gate, praying that it wouldn't squeak as he pushed it open, when Wolfgang grabbed his arm.

"Look there."

"Where?"

"There, across the way, under the portico. Do you see it? Please tell me you do."

Puzzled by the fierce urgency in his voice, Nico looked, saw a flutter of something brightly colored darting in and out of the columns, and then realized with delight what it was.

"Oh, a clown," he said. "I didn't know there were players in town. Maybe we can find them and watch if it doesn't rain again. Look at his costume—ah God, Wolfgang, are you all right?"

Wolfgang was already a pale boy—unsurprising in someone who had spent most of his life practicing music indoors—but now he was the color of curdled milk, his hand still clenching Nico's arm tight enough to bruise. Frightened that he was having some sort of fit, Nico peeled his fingers away, grabbed his shoulder and gave him a good hard shake.

"Wolfgang!" He remembered that they were trespassing in someone's garden and pitched his voice lower. "What's wrong with you? It's just a clown."

Wolfgang pressed his forehead against the gate and curled his hands round the iron bars, staring at the clown as if he would never stop. It was half hidden in the shadows, but its movement was easy to see if you knew where to look.

"I've seen it before," he said. "A long time ago, with my sister."

"Your sister?"

"Yes," Wolfgang said absently. "Nannerl. We used to travel together, but Papa said she had to stop because she was getting too old. Nannerl would remember the clown. I used to dream about it all the time when I was younger. Now it's found me."

The idea that the clown had come looking for Wolfgang in particular struck Nico as both horrible and ludicrous, and also made him wonder for the first time if his new friend might not be a little touched in the head. He had heard that geniuses often were, and Wolfgang certainly qualified as a genius—Nico's father, who knew about such things, had said as much. But Wolfgang's face was so pinched and desperate as he clung to the gate that Nico had to say something.

"It's probably not even the same clown really," he suggested. "All clowns look alike, you know, once they're dressed up and painted. And even if it is a clown you saw somewhere else once, that doesn't mean it's got anything to do with you, does it? Those performers travel around everywhere—they tour, just the way you and your father do, right? You're bound to bump into the same ones again sooner or later if you go to enough places."

Wolfgang shook his head. "It's here for me. I know it is."

Nico opened his mouth, intending to repeat that this was nonsense, and possibly also to suggest that it was time for Wolfgang to go back to his lodging house and stay there. But before he could say anything, the clown peered around the side of a column like a child playing hide-and-seek, and he saw its face for the first time, stark white with greasepaint, punctuated by a pair of darkly outlined eyes and a smeared red mouth. It seemed to search the street, turning its head from side to side, and then its gaze landed squarely on the two boys behind the garden gate. It stared at them for a long moment, and then slowly, slowly it smiled.


	3. Chapter 3

Nico and Wolfgang stood rigid with horror, waiting for the clown to rush across the street at them, or call their names in a terrible voice, or beckon to them with one long finger. All sounded like equally dreadful prospects to Nico, who until five minutes ago had thought of clowns only in terms of the painted and jointed toy one he had played with as a child, which now belonged to his little brothers and sisters.

 _When I get home, I'm going to throw it into the fire_ , he thought, watching with held breath as the living clown's face leered at them from its hiding place. Just when he thought he was about to scream, it was gone, dissolving into the shadows under the portico like a snowflake. He strained his eyes, trying to catch it moving, but saw nothing.

Wolfgang had apparently been holding his breath as well. He let it out in a long, trembling sigh.

"It was just like in my dreams," he said. "Except in my dreams it always had sharp teeth, pointed, like an animal's, with bits of raw meat caught in them."

"That's horrible." Nico looked at Wolfgang's white knuckles on the gate bars. "You'd better let go of those before you hurt yourself."

"What? Oh." With a grimace of pain, Wolfgang unclenched his fingers, shook them briskly to start the blood flowing again, and then pressed both hands to his ruffled shirtfront as if for protection. "I have to go back to the lodging house. I have to write to Nannerl and tell her we saw it. If only I could talk to her right now. Why are letters so _slow_?"

"Because carriages are slow," Nico said. "Listen, maybe we're making too much fuss over this. The clown—" He felt a little of that sick terrified feeling creep back, but pushed through it. "The clown didn't do anything to us. It just stood there and then went away."

"It didn't do anything to us _this_ time," said Wolfgang ominously. "But what if we see it again? In an alley…or a window…or in our bedrooms after the candles are blown out?"

"Don't," said Nico, shivering.

"You were thinking the same thing."

Nico didn't want to answer that, not least because Wolfgang was right. He took refuge in practicality instead.

"Well, the first thing we have to do is get out of this garden before we get caught," he said. Reaching up to try the latch on the gate again, he found it was locked tight and rusted shut for good measure, and shook the bars as hard as he dared before giving up in despair. He would have liked to bang his head against it, but that would have made too much noise. Why hadn't he just stayed at home this morning? Even being bored would have been preferable to standing in a stranger's garden with a mad foreign boy and being menaced by a possibly murderous clown.

"No climbing over this one," the aforementioned mad foreign boy said, looking up at the sharp ornamental spikes that ran along the gate's top and the spongy, slimy green moss covering the walls on either side. "Do we go back to the first wall and hope that fruit-seller's given up by now?"

"Not yet," said Nico. "Let's go a little further. There's got to be another gate or a stable or something, unless whoever lives here can fly like a bird."

Incredibly, given their situation, Wolfgang giggled. "Or it might be a house full of birds pretending to be people! I like that. Would they wear feather cloaks, do you think? And sing like this?" He pursed up his lips and, very softly, whistled a few bars of a chirpy melody.

"All right, bird-brain, for that you can be the one to lead the way," said Nico, rolling his eyes.

Seeming to take no offense, Wolfgang set out, embellishing his whistle as he went until it became a full-fledged song that blended in nicely with the twitters of real birds in the trees. Nico followed, and in a few moments they did find what appeared to be a carriage house, tucked up against the rough, honey-colored stone of the main building. No one seemed to be about, and Nico nudged Wolfgang and pointed at the rear door.

"Let's try it," he said.

"Suppose someone's in there?"

Nico shook his head. "I don't think anyone is. It's so quiet, the owners must be away, or we would have seen or heard them by now. With a place this big, they're probably rich enough to have another house outside the city, and if we bump into a servant who's been left behind, we can pay him not to tell—" He remembered that he and Wolfgang were both penniless at the moment. "Um, or I'll tell him that he can come to my house and my mother will pay him. She'll be cross about it, but better that than stay here forever."

"Fair enough," said Wolfgang. He turned the handle and finding the door unlocked, swung it open, letting out a waft of dusty, horse-perfumed air. Nico rejoiced inwardly and started after him. In half an hour, he would be at home with his wet boots off and a cup of thick, dark chocolate in his hand, and—

"Oh shit." Wolfgang stopped cold just inside the doorway, so that Nico nearly ran into his pink silk back.

"What is it?"

"I think it's someone dead."

"My God!" Nico leaned forward over Wolfgang's shoulder and caught a glimpse of two worn boots sticking out of the nearest horse stall, with a pair of bandy legs clad in grubby brown breeches above them. "Maybe he's not really dead. Maybe he's asleep. Maybe he's drunk."

"I can see his face." Wolfgang advanced a tentative step, straw and grit crunching under the soles of his shoes. "It's all purple. Eurgh! Come and look."

"No, we shouldn't go near him," Nico said nervously. "He might have had a disease. There was smallpox here last summer. Lots of people died."

Wolfgang shook his head. "Nannerl and I had smallpox too, in Vienna, and it doesn't make you look like that, like prisoners do after they're hanged."

"Well, no matter how he died, we'd better go quickly and tell someone that he's here, before he starts to stink," Nico said. "We can fetch a priest-"

"But don't you see?" Wolfgang turned around and looked up into Nico's face with a fanatical light in his round blue eyes. "The clown must have killed him."


	4. Chapter 4

Nico wanted to say _What are you talking about?_ and _You're crazy_ and _I'm going home_. If he had not seen the clown, he would have said all of those things. But he had seen it, and so Wolfgang's theory made a creepy, undeniable sort of sense. Nico's tutor did not approve of imagination and was forever droning on about the virtues of reason and logic and science, but before the tutor had entered his life, Nico had grown up on a steady diet of his nurse's bloodcurdling ghost stories, and according to those stories, evil spirits killed people all the time. While he had never seen an evil spirit himself, and had thought until today that he did not believe in them, the clown's face had been just the sort of thing the stories had taught him to expect. What was more, he didn't think even his tutor could disagree with the idea that if you saw a suspicious person and then immediately found a strangled dead body nearby, there might be some connection between the two.

"What do we do about it?" he asked.

"We don't tell a soul," Wolfgang said. "They'll ask us a lot of questions about how we found him and what we were doing here, and they won't believe us if we tell them about the clown. Papa will probably think I'm having a nervous collapse, and then it will be leeches and mercury and days of lying in bed in the dark. And I don't suppose your mother and father will be best pleased either."

"Probably not," said Nico, thinking about how his father would react to being told that his eldest son had trespassed in someone else's garden and accused a clown of murder to excuse himself. Were there even any travelling players in town, really? He didn't think so. The nurse, who still looked after his little brothers and sisters, was always the first to find out about such things, and the only thing she had said to him that morning was _For pity's sake, Master Nicolas, get out from under everyone's feet and go amuse yourself for a while!_

"Someone will find him soon enough," Wolfgang said. He turned a ghastly, strained smile on Nico. "If it isn't the people who live here, well, like you said, he'll start to stink, won't he?"

"Yes," said Nico, grimacing.

"And then the neighbors will work it out, so let's get away from here before that happens. If we hurry, I can send a letter to my sister by the afternoon post."

Nico had been on fire to leave, but now he found himself hanging back. "But if he was murdered-"

"He _was_."

"Yes, all right, but that's a crime. We should tell the guards."

"You can tell them if you like," Wolfgang said, and set out toward the double doors at the front of the carriage house. Nico looked at the sprawled body, looked at Wolfgang disappearing into the shadows, and in three long steps had caught him up.

"For Christ's sake, Wolfgang! You're the one who wanted to be my friend, remember? It's no wonder you haven't got any of your own if you abandon people this way."

At that, Wolfgang whirled on him and jabbed a small finger weighed down with a ruby ring toward his face. "I _am_ your friend. This isn't anything to do with whether we're friends or not. This is about the clown."

"I wish you'd stop talking about it," Nico said uncomfortably.

"Why, so you can pretend you haven't seen it?" Wolfgang turned around and started walking again, and Nico scrambled after him. "I'm not mad, you know. Well, maybe I am a little, but not like that. I saw it, and so did you. Here, help me with this bolt."

They had arrived at the doors, and Wolfgang was struggling with the heavy iron bolt that held them closed. Nico nudged him out of the way and shot it back himself. The doors swung open, revealing a narrow street with cobbles still wet from the rain. In the distance, Nico saw the spire of a church he recognized and breathed a sigh of relief; at least he knew where they were now. It made him more disposed to be tolerant toward Wolfgang.

"All right, I won't say anything to anyone," he said.

"Good," said Wolfgang. A pair of cloaked and veiled ladies passed on the other side of the street, with a servant following behind them and carrying what appeared to be their shopping. All three heads turned as if pulled by one string to look at the two boys standing in the open doorway of the carriage house. "Now I'd really better get out of here. Good day to you."

He turned and started to stride confidently in the direction of the church, but Nico caught hold of his sleeve and held him back.

"Do you know where you're going?"

"Not really," Wolfgang admitted.

"That's what I thought," Nico said. "Tell me where you and your father are staying, and I'll show you to your door before I go home. It's the least I can do."

He hadn't thought anything could dampen Wolfgang's spirits for long, but the long walk back to the lodging house was a much more subdued one than their earlier expedition through the streets and marketplaces. Wolfgang still carried on a running monologue—Nico was fairly sure only sleep or death would stop him from talking—but it was strange and obsessive, and mostly about the clown, which had now replaced mathematics as Nico's least favourite topic. The lodging house turned out to be only two streets away from Nico's own house, and he asked, a bit halfheartedly, if Wolfgang would like to come and meet his family, but Wolfgang said he had better be getting back before anyone got suspicious. Even Papa wouldn't believe he had sat through three Masses in a row, he said, with a flicker of his usual smile.

They parted at the front door with a promise to write, which Nico suspected Wolfgang might actually fulfill—he had already gathered from their conversation that Wolfgang was a truly prolific letter-writer, applying the same restless energy to his correspondence as his music—and Nico went home, feeling as if he had been swept away into another world and then unceremoniously dumped back into his ordinary life. He put on fresh clothes and hid his wet ones behind the tall, painted wooden headboard of his bed, thinking that perhaps he could brush off enough of the mud when it dried so the laundress wouldn't tell his mother. Then he spent the remainder of the afternoon staring out his window at the rain, which had started again and was bucketing down like it meant business, and wondering where the clown was. He supposed it must have taken shelter as any sensible man would do (and it _was_ only a man, wasn't it, no matter what Wolfgang thought), but the picture that kept coming to his mind was of it making its way through the streets toward him, darting from portico to archway to shop front, capering among the raindrops without ever being touched by them.

Nico shook his head, trying to chase the image away, and went to eat supper with his little brothers and sisters in the nursery. He was old enough to sit at the long table with his parents, but the last thing he wanted to do was attract their attention. His mother in particular might ask him what he had done that day, and that was a question he had no intention of answering. The servants had set up the children's supper table near the fire, and by the time he was finished eating, he was sleepy enough from the warmth and the meal to go to bed, even though it was still early. In the morning, he imagined that meeting Wolfgang would seem like a dream.

Hours later, he was jolted out of his sleep by a rattle at his window, and sat up in bed gasping.

 _Oh_ , he thought, _it must be hail from the storm. Just hail..._

The sound came again, and he realised it was stones hitting the glass, all right, but not with the random patter of hail. Someone was throwing rocks. Muttering all the bad words he knew, he got out of bed, stumbled over to the window, and managed to lift the latch and swing back the right-hand half just in time to catch the next salvo in the face.

"Ouch!"

"Shush!" hissed the small figure in the courtyard below, and Nico's heart sank.

"Wolfgang? What are you doing here?"

"I said shush, for heaven's sake!" Wolfgang looked over his shoulder as if he thought he were being followed, then back up at Nico.

"It's the clown," he said. "It's come after me. You've got to help me, Nico."


	5. Chapter 5

_I'm still asleep_ , Nico thought. That was the only explanation. He was asleep and having a terrible nightmare that Wolfgang was standing under his window, banging on about the clown. He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes so hard he saw stars, but when he looked again, Wolfgang was still there, shivering in the wet darkness, and nearly dancing from foot to foot with impatience.

"What are you talking about? Go home! It's the middle of the night."

"Just come down," Wolfgang hissed. "Please, Nico. I need to talk to you—to tell you—"

"Oh God," Nico said. He thumped his forehead gently against the window frame. Maybe if he slammed into it hard enough, he thought, he could knock himself unconscious, and when he woke up, Wolfgang would have given up and left him alone. It was a vain hope, though. Even on twelve hours' acquaintance, he knew Wolfgang was the sort of person who would keep pursuing him with that same feverish intensity until one or both of them was dead.

"All right," he said. "I'll be down in a few minutes. Just—just try to wait somewhere out of sight, will you?"

Wolfgang gave him a flamboyant impression of a military salute and melted into the shadows round the edges of the courtyard. Torn between annoyance and fear, Nico picked up his dressing gown, considered it for a moment, then laid it back on the end of his bed and wriggled out of his nightshirt and into the clothes he'd been wearing earlier instead. He didn't know what the rest of the night had in store, but whatever it was, he didn't want to face it without his breeches on.

Carrying his shoes, he crept through the silent house, past the nursery where the little ones were asleep with their nurse, past his mother's bedchamber, and then past his father's room at the head of the stairs. On the lamplit landing hung a large, gloomy oil painting of his father, wearing a stiff brocade coat and looking much more grim and severe than he did in real life, and Nico passed underneath it with held breath, feeling as if it were about to demand in his father's voice just what he thought he was doing, stealing about like a thief in the dark.

Once he was safely past the painting, he continued down the stairs and through the entrance hall, then made a sharp left and went along the passage—being careful not to wake the cook, who slept in a small room off the kitchen and had a scream more powerful than an opera singer's—and escaped into the courtyard through the rear door. He was bent over, doing up the buckles on his shoes, when a small hand fell on his arm and nearly gave him heart failure.

"Sorry," Wolfgang whispered. "I couldn't wait any longer."

"Yes, yes, just be  _careful_ ," Nico whispered back. "There's a man who guards the house at night—"

Wolfgang let out a piercing giggle that seemed to reverberate around the courtyard, and then clapped his hand over his own mouth to stifle it.

"He left half an hour ago," he said through his fingers. "He's getting drunk in a tavern in the next street over. I only wish he were here, in case the clown turns up."

In the excitement of sneaking out of the house, Nico had nearly forgot about the clown. Now it came back to him, like the memory of an unsettling dream returning to spoil a sunny morning. He frowned down at Wolfgang, who was wearing soft-soled shoes instead of the court pumps he'd had on that afternoon, and consequently was even shorter than usual.

"Speaking of the clown," he said, "now that you've hauled me out of bed, you'd better tell me what's going on."

"I told you," Wolfgang said. "It came to find me. I couldn't sleep after everything that happened this afternoon, so after Papa was in bed, I got up and lit a candle to work on my antiphon. I'd been hard at it for an hour or so, and then I heard footsteps outside in the street. I thought it was just a watchman making his rounds, but they weren't heavy steps, like boots, and they weren't in the right rhythm. A watchman tramps along in common time, you know, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, but these footsteps were in six-eight, like a tarantella. They came closer and closer, and then they stopped."

Nico swallowed, thinking about the way the clown had capered through the rain-soaked streets in his imagination. "Go on."

"I blew out the candle, to be safe, and I got up to look out of the window, and..." Wolfgang drew a trembling breath. "It was there, just standing in the street and looking up. I could see it because there was a light behind it, from the lanterns outside someone else's house, but I don't think it saw me. I didn't wake Papa because he can't get up with his bad leg, and I knew there was nothing he could do. So I got dressed and crept out the back of the lodging house, the same way you did just now, and I climbed over a wall and came to find you. I remembered you pointing out the turning to get here, earlier."

"I did do that, didn't I," Nico said wretchedly. He wasn't sure whether to be impressed by Wolfgang's seemingly infallible memory, or angry at himself for revealing where he lived. He hadn't been expecting Wolfgang to turn up in the wee hours when he'd done it, but looking back, he ought to have known better.

"Yes." Wolfgang was starting to get nervous, looking around as if he were being pursued again. The moon had appeared between two ragged edges of cloud, casting a black-and-silver chiaroscuro effect over the courtyard, and in that eerie light, Nico could see Wolfgang's fingers moving restlessly, tapping out rapid patterns on his thighs as if he were playing an invisible instrument. "Well? Will you help me? You said we were friends. I gave you a present."

"You gave me a bread roll," Nico said. "It wasn't exactly a blood oath."

"It's the intention that matters," Wolfgang said. "My intention was pure. Was yours?"

"Wolfgang..." Nico put his hands over his face, wishing he were back upstairs in his bed. "If the clown is really after you-"

"It  _is_  after me," Wolfgang insisted. "It came to  _find_  me."

"Well, then you need someone older and stronger than either of us. You need to tell your father and have him send a message to the guards, like I said before. Tell them about the body we found, and say you saw someone hanging about near it and then saw that person again near your lodging house. I'm sure they'll do something."

"Oh, they'll do something, all right," Wolfgang said. "They'll ask me for a description of the suspicious person and I'll tell them it was a sort of insane Harlequin, and then I'll be in the shit for lying, and for going out without permission, and Papa will tell me he's disappointed in me and never let me out of his sight again." His voice was starting to rise to a volume that might be heard inside the house, and Nico grabbed his hand.

"All right," he said, with the feeling he was signing his own death warrant. "What do you want me to do?"


End file.
